Servering av alkohol en fare for flysikkerheten - Curt Lewis

Should Airlines Consider Banning Alcohol On Aircraft?


A traveler relaxes in her airplane seat and enjoys a drink on the flight. GETTY

Should airlines ban drinking on some flights? Could never happen, you say? April Fool!

Not exactly. Drunk and out-of-control passengers are becoming a real problem, groping and assaulting flight attendants, fighting other passengers and air marshals, attempting to open the aircraft door mid-flight and attempting to get into the cockpit, among other issues.

To paraphrase the late Rick James, like cocaine, alcohol "is a hell of a drug."

In 2017, a BBC investigation found that drunk air passenger arrests at UK airports rose 50% over the previous year. In an video posted by the BBC, 14-year Virgin Atlantic flight attendant Ally Murphy said one reason she quit flying were drunk, abusive passengers who groped and swore at her. Once, a "drunk passenger tried to open the plane door."

Serious alcohol-based incidents continue to occur on board. Just last month, an Australian model was convicted for assaulting a flight attendant on a United flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles in January. According to a press release from the US Department of Justice, the woman, Adau Akui Atem Mornyang, 24, of Victoria, Australia, was convicted of offenses relating to a January 21 incident "in which she appeared to be intoxicated and was verbally and physically abusive to personnel and other passengers during the flight."

According to the evidence presented at trial, several hours into the flight, passengers approached a flight attendant "to complain about Mornyang's disruptive behavior, which included flailing her arms and yelling obscenities and racial slurs." When a flight attendant tried to speak to her, she began shouting at him, then slapped him in the face. The flight attendant attempted to restrain Mornyang until federal air marshals on board could restrain her in the rear galley of the plane for the rest of the flight.

A jury found Mornyang guilty of a felony charge of interference with a flight crew and misdemeanor assault. She faces a maximum sentence of 21 years in federal prison when sentenced this June.

In 2018, a Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago to New Orleans was disrupted by a man who threatened to put a flight attendant into "a body bag" for refusing to serve him a fourth drink on the two-hour flight. The man, Joel Michael Bane of New Jersey, then refused to take his seat for landin. When the pilot did manage to successfully land, Bain assaulted a pair of police officers who had to use stun guns to get him off the plane. Amazingly, Bane, who pleaded guilty to one count of interference with flight crew, was sentenced only to two years of probation and a $3,000 fine.

Also in 2018, a Delta Airlines overnight flight from Salt Lake City to Orlando with 193 people on board had to land in Oklahoma City to meet with police officers, after a passenger headbutted a flight attendant when he too was cut off from booze.

And in 2018, a pilot traveling as a passenger on an Emirates flight asked to smoke on the flight, then slapped the chest of a Romanian flight attendant, threw his shoe at her, cursed at other passengers, then grabbed two beers and more booze from the galley. When finally restrained by crew and other passengers in handcuffs, he threatened the flight and slammed his head so hard against the seatback that the video screen broke.

So would airlines ever consider making alcohol-free flights an option? Unlikely; on-board alcohol is not only a precious perk of flying First or Business Class, but a profit source from economy passengers. That $7 on-board beer probably cost the airline less than a dollar, certainly a financially compelling proposition.

While flyers like myself find drinking a good way to deal with today's flying conditions, in-flight incidents do not seem to be going away. Instead, they seem to be getting more frequent, disturbing and violent.

According to the British Civil Aviation Authority, there were 417 reports of serious disruption on flights in 2017, up from 195 in 2015. A survey by Britain's Which? Travel found that one in ten passengers had experienced a flight "blighted by shouting, drunkenness, verbal abuse or other obnoxious behavior". Irish-based low-cost airline Ryanair was apparently the incident leader, with 17% of Ryanair passengers saying they had experienced disruptive behavior in the past year.

Recent Ryanair incidents include a flight featuring a fight between two drunks over a woman's not wearing shoes to the lavatory, another from Glasgow to Malaga with a drunk man bothering an on-board "hen party" resulting in a chaotic fist fight and two unruly men dressed as Tinkerbelle and Bob the Builder being thrown off a flight from London Stansted to Krakow, Poland. But even this had its element of menace, as Tinkerbelle "threatened to cut everyone up" before he was removed.

"Nobody wants to be on a flight with a couple of drunks on board creating trouble," said Michael O'Leary, RyanAir CEO. But he blamed the problem on the airportss, with "stag and hen parties" (who Americans might call "bachelor" and "bachelorette" groups) drinking heavily before a flight and posing a "threat to safety."

O'Leary told the Independent, "Drinking on planes is controlled. On our flights, averaging one hour 15 minutes, the most you'll be served is one or two drinks. And if a passenger is being disruptive, he or she won't be served with alcohol at all." But "Our challenge is: we have passengers, particularly during flight delays, stuck in airport bars drinking six, eight, 10 pints."

Ryanair asked that British airport bars should stop serving alcohol before 10am, and limit passengers to two drinks. As of last November, the British government was considering a similar proposal.

But what about the planes? Could a booze ban be imposed on certain flights, or could "alcohol-free" flights become a thing?

Don't laugh; it happened to smoking, now little missed by most travelers. And that's no April Fool.